


Boundless

by antagonists



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 07:00:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12249330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antagonists/pseuds/antagonists
Summary: Among them all, centuries old and jaded to transience and pain: here, here. Here a path, herein the pathfinder.





	Boundless

**Author's Note:**

> hey i focking love the vanguard

* * *

 

 

 

When they alight upon Titan’s worn red structures, Zavala sees the Arcology of the past, drowned within blue, drowned within storm of neither beginning nor end.

 

The nightmares are relentless, the thralls are endless. He holds his ground. He, too, battles and tastes the iron of his blood that will not fade. Guardians wear red on their skin, as permanent as everything they have forgotten. Bruises a reminder, running blood another memory. The Guardians carry the darkness on their shoulders, and the oceans on their back when they sink. The Fallen are having a feast, it seems, on their misery.

 

Coming here had been a mistake.

 

He stares out at the moon’s great oceans, the thunderous clouds curtaining Saturn’s rings. Another transmission comes in, another Guardian, he realizes, following his lead into their doom. This he cannot allow, and though it pains him to turn them away—for where else will they go? What other home do they have?—he must.

 

 _Commander_ , rings a familiar Ghost, bright and eager. Once again, despite all the odds, The Guardian steps before him: straight-backed, triumphant, and _strong_.

 

 _I saw you fall_ , Zavala almost says, bites back those words and the disbelief. He remembers their staticky exchange just moments before The Traveler had gone dark, how loyal they were to the bitter, defeated end. _I watched you fall_.

 

One of them, returned from death and darkness. He wishes to reach out and touch it—that searing, searing Light.

 

The Guardian decimates the Hive, the Fallen, burns through the night with ash and blade and spark brighter than their Sun. They reclaim hope with a talent Zavala has never tired of through the years. Slayer of Kings, the Death of Gods—Zavala wonders, as he often has, how the wars before would have gone without such a strong Light.

 

No, he knows. He simply does not wish to imagine it.

 

“Little Light,” The Guardian says to their Ghost after Zavala’s most recent order to reunite his fireteam, walking past their newfound and temporary command.

  
“Yes, Guardian,” says the Ghost, swiveling, bright-eyed and curious.

 

They disappear into wisps of sky before Zavala can hear The Guardian’s response. He watches their ship leave, and where his armor has dug bruises throughout the days, he feels none of the empty pain.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Funny thing, traveling through portals. Or, well, being trapped within an infinite loop, victim to the passing days and a dizzying kind of experience with the dimensional and interdimensional and metadimensional. Big words. He does not remember where he last heard those—can’t quite pull out his deck while hovering above ruthlessly patterned ground and ceiling. Something to do with one of Ikora’s lectures about the inner mechanisms of the universe, probably.

 

Cayde truly wonders if he will be here forever. Lost to space and time, forgotten.  Zavala—if he is still alive, would likely have other, far more important things to think about. He first thinks, _of course Zavala’s alive_. Nothing could ever move that blue wall of a man, whether it be in combat or during dreary meetings. At first, however, is the key.

 

They are Lightless, now; upon reconsidering, Cayde finds himself uncertain.

 

The Guardian defeats the Vex.

 

The Guardian reaches in and pulls him back through the swirling white mess of time and—

 

The Guardian steps in through the shattered blue, still trailing ether like a cape of smoke—

 

and Cayde is back on the Moon. He’s out of ammo, aching as through he is made of heart and not steel, staring into the Baroness’ many gleaming, unsurprised eyes. Her blades are broken, as is the skin of her throat. Here echoes a tired and knowing laugh; less of a laugh than her last words. Perhaps in a language he conceptually knows less of, but still manages to understand, somehow.

 

He shrugs off the smell of nightmares in his memories, faces the burn of ether and radiolaria before him now. It still has him jittery, sort of, that gut-wrenching loop through time and space and everything in between. The Guardian’s Ghost is yammering on about… something important? He isn’t sure. He is trying to ignore the Light next to him and how his own chest feels so barren.

 

Zavala needs him, though, and _that_ is important. Very important. Suddenly Cayde cannot really remember why he had been so down in the dumps, other than the tantalizing flicker of Light before him, and he steps back out to red forest and green starlight. With The Guardian, Ikora will not be far along.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She reaches—

where there would be the faint tug of stars, the brilliance of solar, the soothing rush of arc, the heartbeat of the universe—

only to find and feel an aching, yawning emptiness.

 

Ikora withdraws, then, back in upon herself and her small, narrow vessel of bones and mind. After having grown so accustomed to the noise, to the tidal push and pull of Light and everything else, the stillness is silent. The stillness is cold.

 

She goes to Io.

 

Pockmarked, scarred, colorful Io. The skies are as vast, just as deep and blue as she had remembered them to be. She gazes out at the empty city, an eerie mirror of what she had called home for centuries. Rugged walls where she would be standing tall, waiting and listening. Ikora asks questions, open-ended and wanting, and receives nothing; she had expected as much, but this time, being right is the least she wants to be.

 

When The Guardian first approaches her then, a flame amidst the rolling plains and quietude of moonscape, Ikora believes herself walking a dream. She cannot sense, no, not as she used to. But it is there, a warm spark she is so envious of. The Traveler’s light has come back, been resurrected—this she understands—has chosen yet again the chosen to guide them through turmoil and the red fields of war.

 

 _I am afraid_ , she repeats to herself, watches as the Guardian treks across and away. Horror clenches her gut when she hears of the Taken. Desperation, she recognizes—she and Zavala have forgotten it, perhaps, from their years as immortals, wars won with power and wit.

 

But The Guardian perseveres, presses through time and dimensions as easily and naturally as planets in orbit. They were made for battle, she knows, as she and Zavala and Cayde, as the rest of them were, also. Among them all, centuries old and jaded to transience and pain: here, here. Here a path, herein the pathfinder.

 

“Are you afraid?” she asks, expecting a negative.

 

“I am exhausted,” The Guardian replies after a careful silence.

 

“Why do you persist?”

 

“I must,” The Guardian says unsurely as if they have never considered an alternate destiny.

 

They walk away, then, carving another path through the stars. Their light is bright, and their shadow quiet and dark. Ikora prays. She meditates. And she follows.

 

 

* * *

 


End file.
